CfP: Broadcasting health and disease. Bodies, markets and television, 1950s-1980s
Throughout
the age of television health and body-related subjects have been
presented and diffused into the public sphere via a multitude of forms,
ranging from short films in health education programmes to school
television, from professional training to TV ads, from documentary and
reality TV shows to TV news, but also as complementary VHS and similar
video formats circulating in private and public spheres. From live
transmission of daunting surgical operations or accounts of medication
scandals in the 1950s and 1960s to participatory aerobic workouts or
militant AIDS documentaries, bodies and health on television and more
genuinely the interrelationship of the history of health and bodies and
the history of the various TV formats has not been extensively
researched. Our assumption is that such audio-visuals are not conceived
merely as a mirror or expression of what is observed, but that visuals
should be regarded as a distinct, interactive performative power of mass
media societies.
The three-day conference aims to investigate how
television programmes in their multiplicity approached issues like
medical progress and its limits, healthy behaviour or new forms of
exercise by adapting them to TV formats and programming. A telling
example of this is the US born aerobics movement as it was brought to TV
in Europe, in shows such as Gym Tonic (from 1982) in France, Enorm in Form (from 1983) in Germany or the Green Goddess
on BBC Breakfast Time (from 1983) in Great Britain. Contemporary,
similar and yet differing in national broadcast contexts, the conference
seeks to analyse how television and its evolving formats expressed and
staged bodies, health and in the above example fitness from local,
regional, national and international perspectives. How spectators were
invited not only to be TV consuming audiences, but how shows and TV
set-ups integrated and sometimes pretended to transform the viewer into a
participant of the show. TV programmes spread the conviction that
subjects had the ability to shape their own body.
Further, we take
into account the long-term evolution of televisual editorialization and
staging, notably as it focused on the intimate and adapted to
consumer/market logic. We ask what effects these had on the preventive
information and the messages related to current health and medical
techniques that were diffused.
The conference seeks entries and
analyses that contribute to better understanding the role that TV, as a
modern visual mass media, has played in what may be cast as the
transition from a national bio-political public health paradigm at the
beginning of the twentieth century to societal forms of the late
twentieth century when better and healthier lives were increasingly
shaped by market forces.
The conference aims to bring together
scholars from different fields (such as, but not limited to, history,
history of science, history of medicine, communication, media and film
studies, television studies) working on the history of television in
Great Britain, France and Germany (West and East) (the focus of the ERC
BodyCapital project), but also other European countries, North and South
America, Russia, Asia or other countries and areas.
We are
interested in the history of health on television, which cannot be
written without consideration of the history of television itself. We
are looking for papers that trace and analyse television content, as
well as its production and broadcasting, such as:
- the television content, notably related to one (or more) fields of main health interests in the 20th century:
- history of food/ nutrition,
- history of movement/exercise/sports,
- history of sexuality/reproduction/infants,
- history of dependency/addiction/overconsumption;
- the production of health-related themes and images on television;
-
the formats themselves: medical series, lifestyle shows, talk shows,
news reports, news shows, documentaries, telethons – those specifically
focused on health-related issues and those with health-related episodes;
- the authors and actors pushing health and medical issues on television;
- the networks and their operation, i.e. genres, audiences targeted, scheduling, etc.;
- the multiplication of television networks, i.e. the shift from public to private;
-
television as a communication tool, i.e., public service announcements,
advertising (or how productions play on the communication-entertainment
hybrid);
- the public and audiences of these different formats and their reactions.
Papers
might focus on one national, regional or even local framework.
Considering the history of health-related (audio-) visuals as a history
of transfers or entangled comparative perspectives are welcome. The
organizers welcome contributions with a strong historical impetus from
all social and cultural sciences.
The conference will be held on 19-21 February 2018, at Wellcome Trust, London.
Please send proposals (a short CV and an abstract or outline of 500 words) by 1 November 2017 to tkoenig@unistra.fr
Limited travel grants are available, upon application and in accordance to need.
The conference is organized by the ERC funded research group BodyCapital, and hosted by Wellcome Collection.
The healthy self as body capital: individuals, market-based societies and body politics in visual twentieth century Europe
(BodyCapital) project is directed by Christian Bonah at the Université
de Strasbourg in collaboration with Anja Laukötter at the Max Planck
Institute for Human Development, Berlin. The project is funded by the
European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020
research and innovation programme (Advanced Grant agreement No 694817).
The scientific committee:
Christian Bonah (Université de Strasbourg)
Anja Laukötter (Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development, Berlin)
Tricia Close-Koenig (Université de Strasbourg)
Angela Saward (Wellcome Collection, London)
Tim Boon (Science Museum, London)
Virginia Berridge (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine)
Alex Mold (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine)
Contact Info:
Tricia Close-Koenig
SAGE UMR7363 / DHVS
Université de Strasbourg
Contact Email: tkoenig@unistra.fr